Cybersecurity

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in Russia, claiming that latter firm used its monopoly over the App Store to force the company to remove app control and Safari browser blocking from the iOS version of its Kaspersky Safe Kids app, ZDnet reported on Tuesday. Read More >>

Mirai malware, which can infect and grant even unsophisticated actors control over hundreds of thousands of IoT devices, is responsible for some of the most devastating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. Read More >>

Facebook said on Saturday night that within 24 hours of a horrific attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed at least 50 people and wounded dozens of others on March 15, it had blocked 1.5 million attempts to share a video of the attack live-streamed on Facebook by the shooter. Over 1.2 million of those attempts were blocked at upload. Read More >>

The US government has sent a warning to Germany that it may limit what information is handed over via intelligence-sharing agreements if the latter country allows Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to build its next-generation 5G networks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Read More >>

The disastrous plan to implement a nationwide system blocking web users from viewing pornography unless their age and identities are confirmed by a verification service – an astonishingly ill-conceived plan being spearheaded by doddering Brexiteer Theresa May’s Tory government – is nearly a year behind schedule. But the clock is ticking, the Independent reported on Monday. Read More >>

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has acknowledged it made a major mistake when it bought Italian blockchain analytics firm Neutrino, whose senior management staff included several members of infamous Italian firm Hacking Team—which has reportedly sold powerful hacking and surveillance tools to oppressive governments. Read More >>

The National Security Agency has “quietly shut down” the mass surveillance programme it implemented after the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks to analyse metadata on domestic US calls and text messages, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing an episode of the Lawfare podcast with “senior Republican congressional aide” Luke Murry. The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Murry stated the programme has not been used in at least six months, with both papers writing that it is unclear whether Donald Trump’s administration will ask Congress to renew its legal authority when relevant portions of the Patriot Act expire at the end of 2019. Read More >>

Google’s bug-zapping Project Zero team has uncovered what it said was a “high-severity” flaw in the macOS kernel, Wired reported on Monday, and revealed the details on March 1st following the expiration of a 90-day period for Apple to patch the exploit. Read More >>

For too many people, moving the digits around in some variation of Football69Lover is their idea of a strong password. So you might expect something complicated like” “ji32k7au4a83” would be a great password. But according to the data breach repository Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), it shows up more often than one might expect. Read More >>

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has struggled to regain its reputation after it was accused of aiding Russian intelligence operations and its software was banned from use by the US government. But on Tuesday, another layer of mystery was added to the story when a Russian court convicted a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab of state treason in the interest of the United States. Read More >>

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fond of suggesting that all the criticism of his globe-spanning social media empire comes from either the misinformed or the malicious. In fact, Facebook is really all about protecting the privacy of its users! That’s the line he took in a Wednesday interview with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, CNBC reported. Read More >>

In 2017, consumer credit reporting agency Equifax suffered one of the largest data breaches in history, exposing extensive personal information on nearly 150 million customers (and in countless thousands of additional cases, credit-card numbers and scans of driver’s licenses, social security cards, and other identity documents). Congressional investigators later found the incident was the result of massive incompetence on Equifax’s part, but who exactly penetrated the company’s systems for months remains a mystery. Read More >>

Google yanked some 29 photo apps from the Play Store this week after they were discovered to have malicious code that pushes full-screen ads, steals information from users by tricking them into believing they have won a contest, and in some cases even lifted photos from devices to send to the malware designers behind the apps, Engadget reported this weekend. Read More >>